Princess Ruruna, of the Kingdom of Kod, has a problem. Her parents, the King and Queen, have left to travel abroad. Ruruna has been left to manage the nations fruit business. Much is at stake, Kod is known as "The Country of Fruit." Ruruna is not happy though, as she is swamped by paperwork and information overload. A mysterious book, sent by her father, contains Tico the fairy. Tico, and the supernatural book are going to help Princess Ruruna solve her problems with the power of the database. This is the setting for all that takes place in The Manga Guide to Databases. If you are like me and learned things like normalization and set operations from a rather dry text book, you may be quite entertained by the contents of this book. If you would like to teach others about creating and using relational databases and you want it to be fun, this book may be exactly what you need.
Er… Right. It’s Monday morning…it’s gray and rainy and chilly just like it’s been now for days and days… I’m tired, I’m about to go nuts with all this damn rain all the damn time…and this pops up on my computer screen. A Manga. About a princess. In the Country of Fruit. Suffering from information overload. Swamped with database problems. Rescued in the nick of time by Tico The Fairy. I had to stare at this for a few seconds while my brain kept insisting that I was going to wake up any moment now and Monday would begin for real this time…
If this post is confusing you…don’t worry. There’s an in-joke staring me in the face that I just can’t even think about clarifying here.
Those Odd Little Thoughts That Go Floating Through Your Head, Whilst Sitting Alone In Complete Darkness…
[Geek Alert…]
When I’m working with my hands, and trying to completely focus my mind on what my fingers are doing, I’ll close my eyes, so as to tune out the visual, in favor of the tactile. This is something I’ve done ever since I was a kid working on a new model car or a slot car or a Heathkit assembly. It’s a reflex, something akin I think to how I sometimes stare off into nowhere when I’m concentrating on something someone is saying to me.
So I’m in the darkroom trying to load some film into the tank. I had a roll of sprocket damaged film I was trying to get onto a developing reel and because it was damaged it was fighting me. I kept trying to wind it, and felt it kinking and knew that it had jumped the track, rewound and started over. It was getting frustrating. I realized in the middle of all this that I’m closing my eyes to concentrate on the feel of the film going into the reel. Yet I was doing this in complete darkness anyway. There couldn’t have been anything more superfluous just then, then closing my eyes. Yet I kept on doing it. Even when I realized I was doing it, and thought to stop myself. I couldn’t concentrate on not closing my eyes, and getting the film wound correctly at the same time. So I stopped fighting my eyelids and focused my attention on getting the film wound.
I don’t think that’s a habit I got into. It’s some sort of brain reflex.
Banging My Head Against The Wand. Wall. Wand. Ouch. Dammit. (continued)
I’m listening to my German language audio files. I’m dutifully repeating the words and phrases as I am instructed. I am actually getting these first baby steps in the course right most of the time now…
Ask me if I understand English.
Verstehen Sie Englisch?
Ask me if I understand German.
Verstehen Sie Deutsch?
Tell me you understand no German.
Ich verstehe kein Deutsch.
While I am dutifully repeating all this on command, it occurs to me that telling someone you know no German in German is a tad contradictory. It further occurs to me that asking a person who knows no German to say how they would inform someone they know no German, in German, is ridiculous.
When Juan Zamora stopped to refuel his car at a Conoco service station in Richland, the gas pump’s calculator registered a total fee of $26.
But in a freak computer hiccup, the PayPal debit card he used recorded the transaction as $81,400,836,908. Yes, you read that correctly, that’s more than 81 billion dollars.
Initially, Mr. Zamora thought it must’ve been a joke. But after contacting PayPal customer service he was surprised to see that the company treated it as anything but a laughing matter.
“Somebody from a foreign country who spoke in broken English argued with me for 10 to 15 minutes,” Zamora said. ” ‘Did you get the gas?’ he asked. Like I had to prove that I didn’t pump $81,400,836,908 in gas!”
This is more understandable then it looks. If PayPal is outsourcing its customer service to Zimbabwe then the rep would have had no trouble believing you’d bought eighty-one billion dollars worth of gas.
Banging My Head Against The Wand. Wall. Wand. Ouch. Dammit.
So I’m trying to learn German. It isn’t logical since, living here in North America, the sensible second language for me to try to pick up is Spanish. But the illogical motivation is way stronger then the logical one and I know when to give in. It’s not just a certain someone I know. I get intensely curious about a thing and then it becomes an obsession. Photography was like that. And computers. Everyone who knows me knows how I get when something grabs my attention.
German is a puzzle. In a way that Spanish just isn’t. I was down in Mexico last year for the first time and while I could barely speak a word of it, I found it wasn’t too terribly hard to intuit the meanings of some words and phrases. In part, living here in North America, I have been exposed to a lot of fractured Spanish. Amigo. Gracious. Por Favor. Dónde está el baño? But I also found I could read things like signs down there pretty well, even for words I would have had no clue about.
For example. It was hot down in Puerto Vallarta and I wore my sandals a lot as I strolled through the town with my camera. They were a new pair…I’d bought them down in Key West just a few months previously. So I was still breaking them in. I noticed one morning I was starting to get a blister on one heel. The last thing I wanted was something to keep me from walking around comfortably, so I started looking around for a place that sold bandages ("patches", as I’m told the English call them…). The local convenience store chain, OXXO, which was everywhere down there, didn’t seem to have any. I wandered around for a bit and then I saw a little store tucked in the middle of a block with a sign above it that read: Farmacia.
Hmmm…sounds like "Pharmacy"… And so it was. I wandered in and saw a shop that differed little from any small in town U.S. drugstore I’d ever seen, other then some of the brands were unfamiliar. Now then…let me go to Google and get a quick translation of pharmacy in German. Ah…Apotheke…
Well…actually I think I’d have figured that one out too. But the point is many common Spanish words sound like English words. I don’t need that. No necesito que. German, not so much. And I’ve spent my entire life with Spanish hovering in the background. Half my family tree is in California. I am no where near conversant in Spanish, but its sounds are familiar to me. Beautiful even. German just sounds…odd. And the rules are confusing.
There are two words for "you". Sie and Du. And you better get the context of using them right or you’ll offend someone. Sie is the more formal. When in doubt with Germans, use the more formal language. So Sie is "you". Except when it isn’t. Like "excuse me"…Entschuldigen Sie. I think that’s you excuse me…but I’m not sure at this point. And…just look at that damn word. Entschuldigen.Try to pronounce it just by looking at it. Go ahead. Then there is this little oddity: Do you understand? Verstehen Sie? I understand. Ich verstehe. Verstehen. Verstehe. It’s the same word. But it isn’t. Or it is but only sometimes. I see that e – en difference in a lot of German words and I think one pronunciation is when it’s about you and the other when it’s about someone else. Why? Just…why?
I’m not complaining. I’m…puzzled. And my head just wants to crack it now. There’s a certain someone down in Florida who I would love to impress by speaking a little German to him next time I see him. But that’s almost beside the point now. How the hell do Germans understand each other? I’m not complaining. It’s bewildering and I won’t have that. At some level the rules must make sense to them. I just don’t get it.
But that’s where you always start from. Not getting it. I have some language lessons on my iPod that I’ve been going over. And over. And over. Two weeks now and I’m still stuck on lesson one. But I made a conceptual breakthrough of sorts the other day. I’m not so much learning a new language at this point, as learning some new words. The language is in the rules…the syntax…the grammer. I’ll learn that when I get enough new words into my head that I can play with it.
It’s like music isn’t the notes…it’s the melodies and harmonies. It’s the song. I already had two ways to say "excuse me" in English. Excuse me. Pardon me. Same thing, mostly. Yes, there are shades of difference. But there it is. Two ways of saying "excuse me" Now I have a third way. Entschuldigen Sie. Three ways to say it. Two of them are English, and one is German. But it’s the same thing. The point is, you don’t learn the words by linking them to other words (what’s German for ‘excuse me’…?). You have to link them in your brain to meanings. Imagine yourself in a situation where you mean to say something…(excuse me)…and then say the new word until it digs into that meaning along with the other words that you know, that express that thing…(Entschuldigen Sie). Then you’ve got it. The word that is.
Language comes later. Language is how the words make sentances…how they link together to tell you a story. A language is a way to tell a story. Entschuldigen Sie. Verstehen Sie English? Please…because I only know a few crumbs of German…
You’d think he’s never seen Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari. There’s nought so queer as folk Andrew. We Americans have our own strange little ways too. Take a trip into Sid and Marty Kroft land sometime.
You want strange Andrew…? Try a little…Walt Disney? Oh yes. This clip is from Alice in Wonderland, and some of the best animation ever produced. The animator who did the character of Alice was a master…simply a master. But the entire film is a masterpiece of animation. The eye candy is everywhere and it all moves and flows perfectly. This clip from the film starts off being your usual Disney cartoon slapstick but the strange comes in at about 2:15 into it. Remember, Disney did Fantasia too…
I’ll bet if I poked around British movies and TV I could find myself some grade ‘A’ strange in there too. We humans are a funny lot. Strange makes the world go ’round Andrew…
Every time I see this headline scan across my gay news lists I think maybe I’m still asleep and just dreaming that I’m awake and Monday hasn’t really started yet…
I was walking in it again last night. I’ve spent so much time in it now that I can almost draw you a complete set of floor plans. I haven’t a clue what it means, other then what I already know about my hyper imaginative brain.
It’s an oldish rowhouse style house. Not located here in Baltimore, but on some residential street of a town somewhere, possibly the main street. The street has two-lanes, is tree lined and has on street parking. But the house has a small driveway of crumbly asphalt and pebbles. And it’s not attached to the homes on either side: it’s a stand-alone. There is one like it a few blocks from where I live in Baltimore: an odd looking house that looks like it was meant to be part of a row and only one of them was built.
It is narrow like a rowhouse, made of red brick and a stone basement. It is two floors and a basement, which is only half underground in the front and walk-out in the back. There is a small front porch that goes the entire width of the house. The door is in the middle, between two tall windows. There are stairs leading up to the porch on the side, not the front of the house. There is a small grassy front lawn between the front of the house and the sidewalk. You can’t see it from the front, but there is an odd little room jutting off the side of the basement, almost like an add-on. The back yard is overgrown, but not hopeless. The house needs some TLC, especially on the second floor, which is mostly vacant. There is another odd little add-on room jutting off the back of the second floor. There is a wooden shed of some kind in the back yard, right up against the rear property line. I haven’t been in it yet. The grassy-gravelly driveway goes all the way back to the ally behind the house. There are trees lining it and an dilapidated wooden plank fence that blocks your view of the alley, except where the driveway pokes through. You can drive all the way from the street out front to the alley in back…a straight shot, but bumpy.
The front door is made of wood and painted a dark green. It has three small windows across the top and a simple brass door knocker. Walking in, you find yourself in a room that goes almost the entire length of the house. There is a kitchen along the left hand wall (as you walk in). And oldish stove and sink and cabinets. A row of small wooden framed windows runs over them, just high enough that you cannot look outside while you are working at the sink or stove, but enough of them that there is plenty of light to see by. The floors are bare wood without even a few area rugs covering it. There is a staircase in the middle of the room leading upstairs. A couple small rooms in the back are for storage, and a small bathroom.
For some reason, the second floor spooks me. Whenever I go up there I become very apprehensive. Like the first floor, it is vacant. There are two rooms in the front which I have yet to enter though the doors are open and they seem just as empty as the rest of the floor. There is a large open area around the staircase. In the back, is that odd little add-on room. It is way more rickety then the rest of the house, and seems to have been slapped on by some previous owner who had little to no carpentry skills. But it is the only room on that floor with anything going on inside of it. You walk into it and find yourself in a room packed with tools. Hand tools of all kinds are hanging from every available space on the walls. There is a large table saw that seems ancient. Likewise a band saw and both wood and metal lathes. The floor is dark with soot and decades of grime. There are only a couple of small windows letting light inside. This was somebody’s workspace. You can see parts of things that have been left uncompleted. There is a doorway on the right, leading outside to what looks like a fire escape. Next to the door, an ancient powerbox with switches and old style screw in fuses. Old, cloth covered electrical wires run from the box, to various power tools, and bare overhead lights.
The basement is interesting. Like the add-on room, it is full of tools. But it seems more a storage area then a workshop. There are old cardboard boxes full of parts for god knows what, and wooden shelves packed with…stuff…more small cardboard boxes full of hardware and small parts. Metal poles go from the cement floor to the beams above to give the floor above support. The sides of the basement are stone. There is a doorway in the back leading out into the backyard. But there is also a doorway in the right hand wall. That door is always open.
Here’s were it gets really odd…at least so it seems to me. That door should lead outside, since it’s against the right wall of the basement…but it doesn’t. It leads instead to another room. At first I didn’t know it was even there. When I found it on one of my journeys through the house I was amazed. Unlike the rest of the house, it seemed as if it was still being lived in. Except it isn’t. This is a house that I have bought in some strange recurring dreamscape I keep having. That much I know. The house is mine. The previous owners are gone. I’m not sure if I ever even met them but I think I didn’t. I bought it from a real estate agent somewhere. For some reason, this one room was never moved out of. It was left as it was, almost as if the people who sold the house, whoever they were, didn’t even themselves know it was there. I get the sense they never looked in the basement at all…or in that second floor workshop.
You walk through that door and find yourself in what looks like a middle aged man’s den. It’s got a threadbare carpet, wooden paneling, and what looks like a small kitchenette in the back. There is a fishtank on a stand against one wall, an old TV set sitting in a corner with a pair of rabbit ears on top. There are a couple small book cases built into the walls with a few paperbacks and some magazines. In the middle of the room is an old over-stuffed recliner chair, well broken in, that looks like it’s been there for decades, and, oddly, a small ottoman in front of it. Next to the recliner is a small wire metal stand with a phone, an ashtray, an empty glass and a magazine. There is a large window on the side opposite the door from the basement, and another door in the back leading out into the backyard. Something that looks like an old space heater is under the window. Next to it is a small table with a lamp on it. Behind the TV set is a bookcase that has mostly a jumble of old knick-knacks on it, and a few books here and there that look as if they’ve never actually been read.
The room feels cozy, yet…weird. Weird because it looks like its previous owner just got up and left and never came back and now I have acquired it just as it was. The basement storage area and the second floor workshop have that same feeling too. This room was somebody’s retreat from a hard days work, or maybe someplace they spent all their days in retirement. Watching TV, reading the papers, fixing the random snack from the kitchenette and having the occasional smoke. The phone is handy so either they had friends to talk to or just didn’t want to be bothered getting up to answer the phone. I haven’t noticed if there is a remote.
I started having this recurring dreamhouse when I bought my little real-life rowhouse here in Baltimore’s Medfield neighborhood. It couldn’t be more different. For one thing, the dream house is a lot bigger. For another, it’s way older. My little rowhouse was built in 1953 and it’s only 1500 square feet. At a guess, the recurring dream house is a 1920s artifact.
Sometimes I don’t even have to visit the house for it to occupy my dreams. Lately, my dreams about it are I’ve been in the middle of something and suddenly started worrying that I needed to go check on the house, because I hadn’t been there in a while. In some of these dreams I’m still living in one of my old apartments and I’m doing this and that and suddenly I realize I haven’t checked on the house. Sometimes the feeling rushes over me that if I don’t check on the house soon I might somehow loose possession of it. Sometimes I find myself wondering what to do with the stuff in that odd basement room. Actually, when that house enters a dream I’m having, I find myself wondering about what to do with that basement room frequently. It’s very odd.
When I visit the house, I try to avoid going upstairs. There is something about the upstairs part of that house, particularly in the front, not the back where the workshop is, that makes me very apprehensive. I’m getting the creeps right now just recalling it. The rest of the house doesn’t bother me so much, other then it clearly needs some TLC and I’m not sure I can fix it up all by myself. But it seems like a cute house overall, with a lot of potential, and it has a nice yard around it with a really nice big old tree on the right hand side by the front near the street. There’s a house something like it on Falls road a few blocks away. One of these days I’ll post a picture of it so you can get an idea of what I’m talking about.
I’ve often heard of people having recurring dreams. I have recurring dreamscapes. This house is one of them that started happening recently. I was there again last night…the first time in a while I’ve actually been in the house in one of my dreams about it. I was checking the house over and wondering if I should get rid of any of the stuff in that basement room, or try to find its owner and see if he wants any of it. Probably it was related to all the intensive house clearing I’m doing this week. But when something keeps coming back in your dreams, you wonder what the significance of it is…if there isn’t something it’s trying to tell you.
Maybe I’m just a bit nuts. You wonder sometimes about the line between creativity and craziness. I have co-workers who insist they never dream. I dream all the time, and most of it vividly.
Tech columnist Robert X. Cringely once wrote that "If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get one million miles to the gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside." I don’t know about costing one hundred dollars, but the explode once a year killing everyone inside part is on the way…
Authorities have blamed a faulty onboard computer system for last week’s mid-flight incident on a Qantas flight to Perth.
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) said incorrect information from the faulty computer triggered a series of alarms and then prompted the Airbus A330’s flight control computers to put the jet into a 197-metre nosedive.
At least 51 passengers and crew were hurt, many suffering broken bones and spinal injuries, when the plane carrying 313 people from Singapore to Perth climbed suddenly before plunging downwards on October 7.
The plane was cruising at 37,000 feet when a fault in the air data inertial reference system caused the autopilot to disconnect.
But even with the autopilot off, the plane’s flight control computers still command key controls in order to protect the jet from dangerous conditions, such as stalling, the ATSB said.
"About two minutes after the initial fault, (the air data inertial reference unit) generated very high, random and incorrect values for the aircraft’s angle of attack," the ATSB said in a statement.
"These very high, random and incorrect values of the angle attack led to the flight control computers commanding a nose-down aircraft movement, which resulted in the aircraft pitching down to a maximum of about 8.5 degrees."
The pilots quickly regained control of the jet, issued a mayday emergency call and requested an emergency landing at the Learmonth air force base in remote Western Australia where passengers received medical treatment.
"The crew’s timely response led to the recovery of the aircraft trajectory within seconds. During the recovery the maximum altitude loss was 650 foot," the ATSB said.
The plane’s French-based manufacturer has issued an advisory on the problem and will also issue special operational engineering bulletins to airlines that fly A330s and A340s fitted with the same air data computer, the ATSB said.
Oh…your aircraft needs our $230,000.00 per seat service upgrade patch 3b_06-A…
Like that Airbus, my Mercedes-Benz is fly by wire. Seriously. There is no direct linkage between the accelerator pedal and the engine. I push down on the pedal and the onboard computer decides what to do, depending on how fast I’m already going, what gear I’m in, whether I’m driving up or down an incline, the road conditions as judged by the traction control system and I’m sure a zillion other variables it’s evaluating from one instant to the next.
The gear shifter is also more of an electronic control then a direct linkage, although it will lock the transmission in Park. I can press a button next to it to choose between two pre-programmed automatic shifting patterns, "Sport" and "Comfort". And it learns your driving habits and adjusts the pre-programmed shift patterns accordingly. There is a fairly complex set of steps you have to perform to reset the transmission program back to the factory default if you don’t like how its adjusted itself to the way you drive.
Mostly, while driving Traveler, I don’t really notice any of this. The car responds to me very sure and certain. I was driving in a sudden torrent of rain several weeks ago and never, Never have I felt so confident in the car I was driving, so solid and sure was the feel I had for the road while the skies had opened up all around me. I could barely see more then a few feet in any direction at times and the traffic was slowing to a crawl, but the car felt absolutely tight and sure. I never felt the slightest bit of skittishness or uncertainty in the car. The Mercedes was just There.
It’s easy to forget driving that car, that I am not nearly as much in control of it as I was my 1973 Ford Pinto. It just feels like I have more control. It’s a way better engineered automobile. It is much more a driver’s car then anything I have ever owned. But there is a computer, that’s trying to be as invisible as possible, between me and the car. This technology has been working its way into modern automobiles for quite some time now. You may already be driving a car with an adaptive transmission. Fly-by-wire is in the new 2008 Accords, so I was told when I went shopping last year. It’s probably in a lot of other cars by now too. The new hybrids would pretty much have to be fly-by-wire.
It’s nothing to be afraid of, so much as Aware of. All technology can fail. It’s just that computer technology is scary because it works invisibly. You can see the failure mode of an engine. You can take it apart and look at it and see where it broke and reconstruct the sequence of events from all the broken pieces. Software is like a ghost in the machine, running spirit-like inside hardware with no moving parts, just a lot of silent, miniature black monoliths on a green circuit board. When a program crashes, it vanishes like the soul from a corpse. You may know the instructions it was executing at the time it crashed, but it’s unlikely you’ll still have access to the state the system was in just prior to the crash. You have to debug it with whatever state it was left in After the crash…assuming you can get that out of it…and whatever other traces of itself it left behind before it died. It may take days or weeks or months to figure out what it was doing in those final moments, and why the fuck it was doing it.
This is why most cars these days have "black boxes" in them…just like airplanes. For those cases when…you know…the whole thing just blows up…
So I have friends down in Florida (and readers according to my server logs…) and places I’ve visited that I’ve become fond of. So I’m checking the news headlines for the latest on Fay. Last night I heard that the storm might wander offshore, strengthen again and take another swing at Florida.
If You Find Him You Should Probably Not Make Him Angry
Many years ago, I saw someone get hit by a train. I won’t describe it in more detail then that here, other then it wasn’t anyone I knew and I wasn’t all that close to it so I don’t have to remember it in too much detail. But to this day I can recall the sickening moment when I saw it was about to happen.
So today I’m reading some random Internet news headlines and finding myself very grateful that my nightmares didn’t include him getting up and walking away afterward…
Paramedics responded to reports of an individual being hit by a train at Bardwell Park, in Sydney’s south, at about 8.20am (AEST) today.
However, police and paramedics did not find anyone or any sign of injury at the scene, NSW Ambulance says.
Authorities watched CCTV footage of the incident, which showed someone stand up and walk away after being hit by a train.
The rational thing is to be glad that he survived. But rationally it’s hard to imagine someone just standing up and walking away either. A train is Massive. Adding to the creepiness factor, there isn’t a lot of detail in the story, and so the mind naturally fills in the blanks.
Ayutthaya – A body of a 40-year-old man with a cobra carcass in his head was found on a roadside here Sunday morning.
An preliminary autopsy also found that Wiroj Banlen, 40, was wearing a condom although he was putting on his trousers. No semen was found inside the condom.
His body was found on the side of a dirt road in Tambon Lamsai of Ayutthaya’s Wangnoi district at 7 am.
He was bitten several times by the snake on his right leg and on his cheeks.
His hands were clenching the dead cobra, whose body was bitten several times especially on its stomach.
The preliminary autopsy found scales of the snake in his mouth.
His body was sent for a full autopsy at a hospital.
This story is from Thailand, and the translation may be a tad…off. So I’m trying to unpack this. His body was found by the roadside. He was bitten several times by a cobra. Some of the bites were on his right leg, the others on his cheeks. I assume the cheek bites happened while he was trying to eat the cobra. His pants seem to have been at least partly undone and he was wearing a condom as though he was about to have sex, but hadn’t yet. I’m sitting here thinking that if there is a God it must have created human beings because a universe that obeys quantum physics just wasn’t strange enough.
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